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Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Marissa Nadler's self-titled

Yeah, so I was kind of thinking about the hurricane on my run yesterday, along with some other things have gone wrong recently, and listening to Marissa Nadler, because it was the only Dusted record I had, at the moment, that was already out and could be reviewed and run quickly...and the whole thing ran together in a kind of odd review that's up today...

Marissa NadlerMarissa NadlerBox of Cedar

he morning after the hurricane, sunlight streams down on stagnant pools of mud, dapples through the branches of broken, 100-year-old trees, glistens on gravel-strewn, washed out stretches of road. Marissa Nadler, meanwhile, sings on the headphones, scattering the same brilliance on a different, more human kind of ruin, her voice alternatingly piercing and dusky soft as it traverses storm-wracked emotional territories. It takes a minute, given the extreme prettiness of the melody, to recognize that Nadler is, on the opening “In Your Lair, Bear,” singing about a hurricane in someone’s veins in the sweetest, most placating tones of the folk singer’s handbook. How appropriate, you think, as you step over a mess of blown-down sticks and leaves, that when the storm finally breaks, Nadler would be there to sing it down softly, folding it like velvet into a memory chest.